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Movie Misquotations

Over the last century or so, movie quotations, like pop-music lyrics, have come to replace Biblical verses and Shakespearean couplets as our cultural lingua franca, our common store of wit and wisdom. Yet many of the most frequently cited motion-picture lines turn out to be misquotations. The speech from “Dirty Harry” in which Clint Eastwood says, “You’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?” is commonly shortened to “Do you feel lucky, punk?” Michael Douglas’s “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good” (“Wall Street”) is condensed to “Greed is good.” Expressions of James Cagney like “You dirty, yellow-bellied rat” (“Taxi!”) and “Dirty, double-crossing rat” (“Blonde Crazy”) are immortalized as the snappier “You dirty rat.”

Why do we so frequently get the lines wrong?

One phenomenon at work, as in the cases above, is compression. Even Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations falls prey to this type of error. It cites “Apocalypse Now”: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like victory.” What Robert Duvall really says is: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of ’em, not one stinkin’ . . . body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like victory.”

Sometimes lines are altered so they can stand alone, without the cinematic context. In “Island of Lost Souls,” Charles Laughton remarks, “They are restless tonight.” Now we paraphrase this as “The natives are restless.” Sometimes a specific reference is changed to a generalized one. “If you build it, he will come” from “Field of Dreams” becomes “If you build it, they will come.” Misquotations often improve upon the screenwriters’ originals by offering a better rhythm or cadence. Thus “Win just one for the Gipper” (Pat O’Brien in “Knute Rockne, All American”) is remembered more mellifluously as “Win one for the Gipper.”

The most famous example of a film line improved by the popular mind is, of course, Ingrid Bergman’s request to the pianist in “Casablanca”: “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By.’ ” It didn’t take long for the line to begin to shift. Nigel Rees, the British author and quote maven, has noted that Jack Benny included “Sam, Sam, play that song for me again, will you?” in a radio parody of the movie a year later. At some point along the way, it became the memorable “Play it again, Sam,” which Woody Allen helped to cement by using the paraphrase as the title of a 1969 play and a 1972 motion picture.

Another notable instance of the progression of cinematic phrasing toward greater euphony is a line of Mae West’s. For her play “Diamond Lil,” West wrote: “Why don’t you come up sometime?” The later film “She Done Him Wrong” made it longer: “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?” We know it today as “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”

Sometimes movie dialogue is recalled inaccurately so as to preserve visual cues that would otherwise be lost. “Me Tarzan, you Jane” is so established that Bartlett’s is again taken in, sourcing this as “Spoken by Johnny Weissmuller in the movie ‘Tarzan the Ape Man.’ ” In fact, in the film Weissmuller alternately taps himself and Jane Parker, repeating, “Jane . . . Tarzan.” It was only later, in an interview in Photoplay magazine, that Weissmuller poked fun at his role by characterizing it as “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

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Misquotations can sometimes be quite subtle, faintly but significantly improving the diction of a quote. The Laurel and Hardy catchphrase “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into” has been transmuted to “Here’s another fine mess. . . . ” Our memory can sex up a line, misstating Jean Harlow’s “Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?” (“Hell’s Angels”) as “Excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable.” Wording can also be changed to keep up with colloquial speech. In 1948, in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” Alfonso Bedoya declared, “I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” In a 1967 episode of the TV series “The Monkees” and in “Blazing Saddles” (1974), this was revised to the now-dominant version: “Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”

The boldest form of misquotation is the wholesale fabrication, attributing words to movies in which nothing like them appeared. These are sometimes created by comedians doing impressions of actors in movies. Charles Boyer is widely thought to have spoken “Come with me to the Casbah” to Hedy Lamarr in “Algiers,” but as Nigel Rees discovered, the line was the creation of Boyer impersonators who used it to mock the film, and it was not uttered on screen. The phrase most famously associated with Cary Grant — “Judy, Judy, Judy” — was never spoken by Grant in a movie and may have had a similar origin in an impersonation of him.

When a quotation captures the essence of a performer, we want to believe it was spoken, even if it would have been anachronistic. Again Mae West and “She Done Him Wrong” (1933) provide an example. “Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” is often ascribed to that film, but it does not appear there or in any of her other early productions: it was too risqué for the time of its supposed use.

It is a fitting homage to the fantasy machine of Hollywood that its verbal gems are no less compelling when their origins are themselves fantasies.

Fred R. Shapiro is the editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations” and associate librarian and lecturer in legal research at Yale Law School.

A version of this article appears in print on January 17, 2010, on Page MM18 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Movie Misquotations. Today's Paper|Subscribe